Abstract : This document reports the situational analysis of business transfer ecosystem in France as it stands in early 2015. In France there are no dedicated public datasets about ownership transfers. Ownership transfers can be deduced from different sources (e.g. Insee, Infogreffe, Diane, etc.), which result slightly different numbers about realized business transfers. Depending on the source, there are around 50 000 potential firms to be transferred each year in France (including all sizes, types, and industries). The French statistic organism (INSEE) does not count the creation of holding to the purpose of buying a target as transfers but as creations from scratch.
Some of the key actors of the SME ownership transfer market carry out surveys about the ecosystem. For example, CNCFA and Epsilon Research survey the ownership transfer market each year since 2010. DG Tresor (governmental organization), Groupe BPCE (private bank), CRA (National association for SME transfers), and BPI France (a public investment bank) also publish reports and studies about ownerships transfers in France.
The material for this report comes from these above secondary sources and interviews with some of the key actors in the SME ownership transfer market. The interviewed actors were AFIC (Association Français des Investisseurs pour la Croissance), CCI (Chamber of Commerce and Industry), CNCFA (Syndicat des Professionnels des Fusions et Acquisitions), CRA (Cédants et Repreneurs d’Affaires), CGPME (Confédération générale
des petites et moyennes entreprises), and Reseau Entreprendre Isère. The interviews were carried out by the authors of this report. Each interview produced a mini-case about an actor in the SME markets. The mini-cases can be found from the appendixes of this report.
To put the business transfers in its proper context, there were around 3.14 million firms (non-agricultural) in France in 2011, of which 243 were big, 5 000 mid-size, 138 000 SMEs, and 3 million micro-firms. On average there are 500-550 000 new entries (of which around 5% employ more than one person) and 50-60 000 exists each year in France.